Alaa Khalil

Despite its undoubted potential to generate profound insights into individual experience, self-study risks solipsism and ‘talking to oneself’. Yet moving beyond oneself is not easy philosophically or practically. Paradoxically, the move from self-focus to embracing difference and otherness can be facilitated by an emphasis on assuming an outsider’s perspective on such difference and otherness—what the Russian thinker (Bakhtin, M. M. (1986). Response to a question from the Novyi Mir editorial staff. In “Speech genres” and other late essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Ed., V. W. McGee, Trans.) (pp. 1–9). University of Texas Press.) called “exotopy”. This chapter posits exotopy as a methodological innovation in collective self-study through its capacity to integrate intensely personal self-experiences and shared understandings with others. This argument is illustrated by analysing the three authors’ collaboration in the form of co-authoring this chapter, where we use three pairs of organising questions to frame our respective approaches to contemporary education research.